Editing One Thousand and One Nights (section)

=== Printed Arabic editions ===
The first printed Arabic-language edition of the ''One Thousand and One Nights'' was published in 1775. It contained an Egyptian version of ''The Nights'' known as "ZER" ([[Hermann Zotenberg|Zotenberg]]'s Egyptian Recension) and 200 tales. No copy of this edition survives, but it was the basis for an 1835 edition by Bulaq, published by the Egyptian government.
[[File:Arabic manuscript with parts of Arabian Nights, collected by scholar and traveler Heinrich Friedrich von Diez, 19th century CE.jpg|thumb|Arabic manuscript with parts of Arabian Nights, collected by Heinrich Friedrich von Diez, 19th century CE, origin unknown]]
The ''Nights'' were next printed in Arabic in two volumes in Calcutta by the [[British East India Company]] in 1814–1818. Each volume contained one hundred tales.

Soon after, the Prussian scholar [[Christian Habicht (historian)|Christian Maximilian Habicht]] collaborated with the Tunisian Mordecai ibn al-Najjar to create an edition containing 1001 nights both in the original Arabic and in German translation, initially in a series of eight volumes published in [[Breslau]] in 1825–1838. A further four volumes followed in 1842–1843. In addition to the Galland manuscript, Habicht and al-Najjar used what they believed to be a Tunisian manuscript, which was later revealed as a forgery by al-Najjar.<ref name="Marzolph, Ulrich 2017" />

Both the ZER printing and Habicht and al-Najjar's edition influenced the next printing, a four-volume edition also from Calcutta (known as the ''Macnaghten'' or ''Calcutta II'' edition).<ref>''[https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009733325 The Alif Laila or, Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Commonly Known as 'The Arabian Nights' Entertainments', Now, for the First Time, Published Complete in the Original Arabic, from an Egyptian Manuscript Brought to India by the Late Major Turner Macan]'', ed. by W. H. Macnaghten, vol. 4 (Calcutta: Thacker, 1839–42).</ref> This claimed to be based on an older Egyptian manuscript (which has never been found).

A major recent edition, which reverts to the [[Syria]]n recension, is a critical edition based on the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Syrian manuscript in the [[Bibliothèque Nationale]], originally used by Galland.<ref name="BnF manuscript">{{cite web |title=Les Mille et une nuits |url=https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8433372b |website=Bibliothèque nationale de France |access-date=29 September 2020}}</ref> This edition, known as the Leiden text, was compiled in Arabic by [[Muhsin Mahdi]] (1984–1994).<ref>''The Thousand and One Nights (Alf layla wa-layla), from the Earliest Known Sources'', ed. by Muhsin Mahdi, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1984–1994), {{ISBN|90-04-07428-7}}.</ref> Mahdi argued that this version is the earliest extant one (a view that is largely accepted today) and that it reflects most closely a "definitive" coherent text ancestral to all others that he believed to have existed during the [[Mamluk]] period (a view that remains contentious).<ref name="sallis" /><ref>Madeleine Dobie, 2009. Translation in the contact zone: Antoine Galland's Mille et une nuits: contes arabes. p. 37. In [[Saree Makdisi]] and [[Felicity Nussbaum]] (eds.): "The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West"</ref>{{sfn|Irwin|2004|pp=1–9}} Still, even scholars who deny this version the exclusive status of "the only ''real'' Arabian Nights" recognize it as being the best source on the original ''style'' and linguistic form of the medieval work.<ref name="beaustyle" />{{sfn|Irwin|2004|p=55}}

In 1997, a further Arabic edition appeared, containing tales from the Arabian Nights transcribed from a seventeenth-century manuscript in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic.<ref>''Alf laylah wa-laylah: bi-al-ʻāmmīyah al-Miṣrīyah: layālī al-ḥubb wa-al-ʻishq'', ed. by Hishām ʻAbd al-ʻAzīz and ʻĀdil ʻAbd al-Ḥamīd (Cairo: Dār al-Khayyāl, 1997), {{ISBN|977-19-2252-1}}.</ref>